Reuters
CAIRO: Adorned with lotus and papyrus columns, Egypt s top courthouse evokes the pharaonic temples of the country s ancient past. The Supreme Constitutional Court, built in 2000, marked the most prominent attempt in decades to revive the pharaonic style in Egypt. On the east bank of the Nile south of Cairo, the court has inspired more attempts to imitate the ancient. The government has erected a series of neo-pharaonic buildings, the style apparently striking a chord with officials. Builders are putting the finishing touches to the gold-rimmed tops of columns decorating a government building on one of Cairo s main roads. We wanted a design which expresses Egypt. You cannot see the pharaonic without thinking of Egypt, said Diaa El-Din Ibrahim, whose firm designed the building. But critics say contemporary Egyptian efforts to reach for the past are misguided. The results are little more than kitsch monstrosities more suited to Las Vegas than Cairo, they say. It looks like theater decoration, not architecture. It s cliche, Egyptian architect Omar El Farouk said. They are trying to impose a style which has nothing to do with our social habits, social life, said Farouk, a student of Hassan Fathy, one of Egypt s most renowned architects. Today s architects do not understand the meanings behind ancient Egyptian designs and are merely copying shapes, said Aly Gabr, an architect who teaches at Cairo University. These forms had meanings during those periods. But the meaning is lost because we were cut off from those periods ideas by the Coptic (era) and then the Islamic. You can t go beyond the shapes because you don t understand them, so the architect just does a freestyle cut and paste, he said. We teach students to read between the lines, not copy the lines themselves, he said. The current spate of building is not the first foray by Egyptian architects into the realm of the neo-pharaonic. The search for a national style of architecture after Egypt won official independence from Britain in 1922 produced Giza s pharaonic train station and the mausoleum of nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul in Cairo. But the neo-pharaonic style, which marked a departure from the European architecture of central Cairo, only appears in a handful of buildings. More popular was the Islamic style, reminiscent of Cairo s medieval walled city. It appears that it was mostly the westernized elite nationalist leaders who showed interest in the neo-pharaonic, Gabr said. The Egyptian state has for decades branded itself with symbols of the country s ancient civilization, giving state-owned firms pharaonic logos, naming streets and squares after pharaohs and erecting statues of ancient figures. While some architects revile Cairo s latest neo-pharaonic edifices, fans of the style say it reminds Egyptians of their shared history. More than 90 percent of Egypt s 73 million people are Muslim and most of the rest are Christian. Sectarian violence over the past year has provoked repeated government statements that all Egyptians are citizens of the same country. Neo-pharaonic architecture provides a stamp of national identity which does not draw on any particular faith. It s a nice way of harking back to the past and also providing a national viewpoint that is non-denominational, said Salima Ikram, an assistant professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt s Supreme Council for Antiquities, said neo-pharaonic construction showed Egyptians were taking more pride in their ancient past. I am happy because it proves to me that Egyptians have begun to fall in love with ancient Egypt. Egyptians are saying: We are the descendent s of the pharaohs, Hawass said. We are more pharaohs than connected to Africans, or Arabs or anything like that, he said.
